Fastening and unfastening laces is usually frustrating for children, especially when it involves athletic shoes. Even their parents often become impatient when helping their children or waiting for their children to tighten their laces. Part of the frustration stems from the friction between the laces and the upper covers of the shoe which increases the difficulty and time consumption of tightening or untightening the laces. This is especially true at the paired eyelets for the laces, at the edges and at the tongue portion of the upper cover since the laces are generally laced in a criss-cross or overlapping pattern over the tongue portion. Hence, a relatively large surface area of the laces is in frictional contact therewith.
Typically two conventional approaches are employed to deal with this problem. The first is to make shoe eyelets wide enough to allow easy passage of the lace. The second is to make the eyelets out of stiff and smooth materials, such as metal.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,916,833 for "Enhanced speed Lacing Device With An Integrated Adjustable Width, Adjustable Tension System", for example, discloses a dual shoe eyelet device for faster lacing. Each eyelet provides special slots which laced by slipping the laces through the eyelet slots rather than threading the laces through the narrower conventional eyelets. These eyelet devices are fixedly attached to the shoe and are not part of the conventional shoe.
While this approach does reduce friction forces between the lace and the eyelets, the large frictional forces caused between the overlapping laces and the edges, and the frictional forces between the laces and the tongue portion of the upper cover are still abundant. Hence, tightening and untightening the laces may still be problematic. Moreover, this device fails to address the difficulty in holding and pulling the lace during tightening and loosening.